High-Throughput Deep Learning Detection of Mitral Regurgitation

BACKGROUND: Diagnosis of mitral regurgitation (MR) requires careful evaluation by echocardiography with Doppler imaging. This study presents the development and validation of a fully automated deep learning pipeline for identifying apical 4-chamber view videos with color Doppler echocardiography and detecting clinically significant (moderate or severe) MR from transthoracic echocardiograms. METHODS: A total of 58614 transthoracic echocardiograms (2587538 videos) from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center were used to develop and test an automated pipeline to identify apical 4-chamber view videos with color Doppler across the mitral valve and then assess MR severity. The model was tested internally on a test set of 1800 studies (80833 videos) from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and externally evaluated in a geographically distinct cohort of 915 studies (46890 videos) from Stanford Healthcare. RESULTS: In the held-out Cedars-Sinai Medical Center test set, the view classifier demonstrated an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.998 (0.998-0.999) and correctly identified 3452 of 3539 echocardiography videos as having color Doppler information across the mitral valve (sensitivity of 0.975 [0.968-0.982] and specificity of 0.999 [0.999-0.999] compared with manually curated videos). In the external test cohort from Stanford Healthcare, the view classifier correctly identified 1051 of 1055 manually curated videos with color Doppler information across the mitral valve (sensitivity of 0.996 [0.990-1.000] and specificity of 0.999 [0.999-0.999]). In the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center test cohort, MR moderate or greater in severity was detected with an AUC of 0.916 (0.899-0.932) and severe MR was detected with an AUC of 0.934 (0.913-0.953). In the Stanford Healthcare test cohort, the model detected MR moderate or greater in severity with an AUC of 0.951 (0.924-0.973) and severe MR with an AUC of 0.969 (0.946-0.987). CONCLUSIONS: In this study, a novel automated pipeline for identifying clinically significant MR from full transthoracic echocardiography studies demonstrated excellent performance across large numbers of studies and across multiple institutions. Such an approach has the potential for automated screening and surveillance of MR.